Indio | San Francisco | ONSITE | Full-time | Lead Frontend Engineer
Indio (http://www.useindio.com) is getting way too many customers and we need some team members to help us handle the bountiful harvest!
We're really looking for a talented lead front-end engineer!
What we're looking for:
- You’re ready to help lead front-end development for our broker product
- You’ve played with all the major JS frameworks and can debate React vs Angular for hours
- You enjoy learning about how customers use what you build just as much as figuring out how to architect it
- You’re interested in joining a seed stage company that’s experiencing rapid growth and needs help keeping it all under control
- You live in the Bay area or want to move here soon
We’re an insure tech startup… but we’re trying a different twist than the standard “repackage an insurance product for millennials with sweet marketing”.
You see.. we really like the veterans. The insurance brokers who have been in this industry for years and are now seeing insure tech flip their world upside down. These brokers know more about insurance than any of us could ever hope…but they need our help!
They’re behind the times and desperately looking for solutions that allow them to compete again!.We’re building the software that can turn any existing insurance broker into a tech savvy company. We’ve helped insurance agencies of all sizes earn their stripes in the insure tech world by giving them powerful platforms they can use to give their clients a better experience.
And just like our customers, we’re veterans too! Our team has prior acquisitions under our belt and we’re hungry for more. We’re YC and 500 Startups alumnus, and have a tech first culture.
We love delighting our customers and know you will too. Come on board and let’s superpower the insurance world!
Your website is honestly really confusing. The design is nice and clean but the messaging is really lacking. I've ran multiple small businesses and I have no idea what "Zero agent rental forever" would ever mean to a business owner. I also had no idea what IVR meant and I've actually built automated message systems on Twilio.
Are you providing me the agents or do I have to supply themselves? It looks like you're just the software but once again the wording/copy made things incredibly confusing.
Your messaging should reflect that you provide easy to use call center software. If you're competing mainly on price then the "pay only for the calls you make" should be a tagline somewhere... that's a powerful message but I don't see it anywhere on the site.
I also don't really like the design on your features pages..at first I thought they were lists of blog posts. There's so much spacing with big faded images that don't make it easy to see the product. Not to mention you're peppering me with that free trial button when I really just want to read what each feature does...and then you could throw me the CTA at the end of the page if I liked this feature.
May I add if Ola, GE, Monsanto, foodpanda and DD are indeed happy customers of yours... that's an amazing achievement that should be highlighted more. With testimonials.
They are very happy customers :) and we have more too, HDFC life, Zomato, BigBasket, Practo, Intuit, HUL etc. But they are all Indian customers, so not sure if their testimonials will have real value for US customers. But I think your suggestion is good. Let me A/B test with that. Thanks.
I believe Intuit and Zomato are relatively well known in the US. Inuit especially through TurboTax. Maybe you could do something like "Inuit, developer of TurboTax"
I second this. Many of the people who might have the decision to buy, whether barely or really technical, will have heard of Intuit TurboTax. They'll know that's big deal.
But did "Intuit of India" develop TurboTax at all, there might be an issue of truth because same-named entities in different countries aren't necessarily legally part of a single corporation.
The brand is known, so maybe don't mention Turbo Tax but if you show the logo and it's a real testimonial it won't hurt too much that it's all Indians.
My little brother ran one of the top 10 Minecraft servers a couple years ago. On a good day, he'd average 1000 players online during US hours. His server had a bunch of minigames with the most popular ones being a clone of Call of Duty and Star Wars Battlefield in Minecraft.
This was monetized on the backend by charging players money for in-game items. It was fairly regular for a player on his server to pay $100+ to have access to an in-game gun or other virtual item he'd created on his server. I won't say how much he was making but it definitely was enough to pay several thousand dollars in monthly server bills and $3-5k/month to Youtubers who would drive traffic to the server.
The top 3 servers were pulling well into 7 figures a year each for virtual items that would often disappear or for a kit loadout in a minigame that would be gone the next month. A lot of these guys churned through user bases pretty quickly but it didn't stop the endless flow of 13 year olds with their parents credit card. None of them offered support options and there wasn't really a way to get a refund after you'd spent $100 on a virtual kit on a 3rd party server mod.
I think part of the reason Microsoft is doing this is to regulate the number of angry calls they were getting by parents of kids who spent way too much money on servers that Microsoft had no control over. Not to mention this will let them get a scoop of what I'd estimate to be a side income stream of at least $200m/year in revenue through 3rd party servers.
I think this is slightly different. Minecraft created a EULA that servers have to agree to a few years ago, basically saying you can't charge people for items. A lot of servers get around this by charging for "ranks" that are basically a prefix before your name and then a couple of added permissions, one of which is usually regular access to a kit containing some fixed items. People are still paying for items, but there's no fixed price of "$1 for 64 diamonds" or whatever. That's how server monetization works (last I checked).
This looks to be monetizing client-side content like maps, textures, and skins. Basically just charging for things that have, until now, just been free to download that don't actually change the experience in-game, but just the look and feel of the game.
Source: used to be really involved in the MC community
Thank you for the info. I had made some obvious guesses (the servers part) but could not have figured out that youtubers were so expensive or the profit so great.
I've seen that a well known server pays €20 an hour to developers. Mods use to work for free. Kids thinks that the server is "a community" so they're not very demanding.
A friend of mine used to develop for minecraft servers essentially professionally. Getting paid $100 for an hour's worth of work was not too uncommon. Back then they typically paid on a project basis, though.
While that would be great, I don't think it's going to happen. It smells like this is a feature limited to the relatively closed ecosystem of the non-Java version of Minecraft. Is it even possible to create heavily modded servers with the non-Java version. I'd be surprised, but maybe things changed in the recent year. If not, this doesn't help the existing server networks at all.
Foursquare honestly has some of the best user location data you can buy on the market.
The only companies out there with better historical data are Facebook, Apple, and Google. And as far as I know, I can't call them up and start buying from them within a few weeks.
I've seen hedge funds right now making millions off of Foursquare's data as they can build algorithms around it quite easily and there's plenty of history to backtest off of. The great part is that Foursquare's previous money maker was selling their places database so they've already done a great job mapping GPS coordinates to businesses and it's pretty easy to map that further to a ticker symbol. Perfect for quants.
By combining Foursquare data with anonymized credit card data from Intuit or Yodlee... you've got the ability to predict retail sales on a DAILY basis rather than on a quarterly basis. You might even be able to a better job than that actual business in predicting their growth if you've got a whole team of quants working on creating the data models.
This is the start of a shift from the market at large relying on quarterly earnings for these types of companies and instead being able to track performance on a daily level. As far as I can tell, there's nothing companies can do to stop this either.
How do they continue to get accurate data about location? Fewer and fewer people "check in" to foursquare now. Presumably thousands have uninstalled the app. How will 4sq solve this going forward?
They still get millions of location updates every 15 minutes. I don't remember the exact number as it has been a couple years since I talked with people using their data but it is much much higher than you would expect.
They don't need you to "check-in" when they are grabbing your location every 15 minutes in the background. They've also built APIs into ad networks that ping their location database with coordinates millions of times a day to find relevant ads. There's thousands of apps using ad networks that funnel location data back to 4sq.
Techies may have abandoned them, but they still have a ton of middle America thinking that 4sq is cool. My mom for example.
On another note, 3-4 years ago I had access to a large anonymized bank/credit card transaction database from a well known company. It had about 1-2% of all transactions in the US by our estimates. When we modeled the quarterly sales of Walmart compared to it we found that it was incredibly accurate going back 5 years, even with 1/50th of the US population.
> On another note, 3-4 years ago I had access to a large anonymized bank/credit card transaction database from a well known company. It had about 1-2% of all transactions in the US by our estimates. When we modeled the quarterly sales of Walmart compared to it we found that it was incredibly accurate going back 5 years, even with 1/50th of the US population
I used to work for an Australian consultancy "Quantium" who are doing exactly this and scale transaction data using national statistics data [1] - page 13
Some Capital One employees had the same thought and hijacked their data to make $4.4M over ~15 months:
> "The SEC sued colleagues Nan Huang and Bonan Huang in January 2015 alleging they made hundreds, if not thousands, of keyword searches on their company's private database for sales data on at least 170 publicly traded companies from November 2013 to January 2015."
It seems like the biggest problem was misusing non-public Capital One data. Imagine if a personal finance app made that part of their business model and got scale.
Something like Mint could front a powerful consumer investment strategy..
There's a great article on it that I'm struggling to find. But essentially, the Shazam app and related apps built on their tech are used as a massive A/B testing tool now by artists. Roll out 3 versions of the same song to 3 similar cities in the Midwest and see where it gets the most shazam lookups.
If I recall correctly a few years back they were doing $100m a year by basically being able to give everyone in the music industry insight into what's the most popular and upcoming songs in every major city.
However, with the popularity of Spotify I'm guessing they're losing a lot of market share in the mass music metrics space.
> They don't need you to "check-in" when they are grabbing your location every 15 minutes in the background.
If they are tracking users who are not actively using the app then that is just plain creepy and wrong. Are you saying Foursquare tracks background location to thus day for users who installed it and tried it out once a few years ago? That would explain the database value but it's Creep City.
Operating systems should expire those background privileges for apps that fall into disuse (or do they already?)
On the iPhone you can go to "location services" and see a list of who's tracking you. I just did and there are 8 that say "always". You can turn it on and off but few people including myself bother much.
Foursquare has been pretty much unused in The Netherlands, as it is a small but important market as they are rich to the max. If your service doesn't succeed or sell in The Netherlands, it's usually indicative to your service at large.
For the Foursquare/Swarm apps, when they are able to track your location 24/7, they create a list of places that you may have visited and allow you to create an after-the-fact check--in. That's what's obviating the need for users to actively check in to the app(s).
They likely have multiple streams for data ingestion including Swarm/Foursquare and the signal data provided by thousands of developers that use their API including some large folks like Uber, Apple, Snap, Samsung, Twitter, Microsoft etc.
Even if both of their apps fail, they likely have a lot more inbound data from these large partner sources to continue to build out a pretty healthy pipeline to provide better data.
I'd estimate about 2% of my Facebook friends are regularly using Swarm, and about half of them very heavily (multiple checkins every day). It would be foolish to extrapolate from a sample of 1, but I find it likely that they still have tens of millions of active users. Maybe they have something in the pipeline to make Swarm more interesting?
I was a bit surprised that the article didn't include 'Foursquare Hedge Fund' as yet another way to make money. Seems like they could exploit their own data just as easily.
Of course I really have no idea how difficult it would be to 'start' or manage a hedge fund. However I have met people who have run hedge funds and presumably such a person could be hired. Or more simply an exclusive partnership could be established with an existing hedge fund which was already able to use the data.
The underpinning of my surprise was the business case analysis. Your the CEO of Foursquare and you're looking at all the ways you can use your assets and services to generate revenue. You come up with selling this sort of demographic data. That gives you revenue $X. Now one of the buyers of your demographic data is hedge funds that are making a return Y % on their investments. Which increases a marginal amount dZ % when they incorporate your data into their strategies and algorithms. If you could accurately characterize the impact you could compare 1/2dZ % annually to the $X value to see which was larger. Conversely you could take say $10M and put it into the hedge fund and have them remit back to you 1/2 of the annual return each year and compare that to $X.
And of course if you're Goldman Sachs does it make sense to buy FourSquare and keep all the data for yourself? One could look at that investment in a similar way using internal rate of return on the buyout price vs the improved rates of return on their investment products.
Aside from the fact that they are a data company, not a fund... While what they are doing is completely legal it's safer for the company investing off of data to be separate from the company creating the data. Less conflicts of interest in the event it eventually becomes a legal issue.
No. Insider information has to ultimately come from an insider. Foursquare isn't getting its information from companies, it is getting them from its users.
Head of engineering at Foursquare here. Thanks for all the enthusiasm around our story. I’ve been at Foursquare since 2010 and can share some additional insight.
If you're an engineer building out a location-based product, and you’re curious how you can play around with our location data, we do have one of the world's most robust place databases. Twitter, Microsoft, Samsung, Snapchat, Apple, Uber, Pinterest —some of the world’s biggest tech companies— are building products on top of our Places database and API. We have a good-size free tier, and it's easy to get started: https://developer.foursquare.com/
The fact that it’s considered to be one of the most accurate databases, and that it’s widely trusted (used by more than 100K developers), didn’t come easily. The accuracy of our our place search API has been steadily improving over the past seven years. To do it well is a really challenging engineering problem. The sensor signals available from iOS/Android location services in today’s phones are often only accurate to tens of meters—especially when indoors. And this is an improvement! So we've taken the billions of check-ins we've collected since 2009 to basically create a model of what physical places look like from the perspective of a mobile device.
We continue to capture training label data from Foursquare City Guide and Foursquare Swarm usage, which allows us to continuously improve our place search model. A lot of complex machine learning and infrastructure goes into solving this problem. And by the way, Place search is just one of Foursquare’s many engineering challenges. We've been innovating and building new products over the past eight years. In March, we launched our Pilgrim SDK. There are even bigger challenges and opportunities ahead...
I know this because I've been here almost since the beginning: Right now is the most exciting time in the company's evolution.
It's important to mention that we take our user data privacy extremely seriously. Some of the products we're currently working on, including the ones that are mentioned by the Entrepreneur article, are built on anonymized and aggregated visit data. The products that we're building don't expose any individual visitation data at any point. We are forthcoming with our community about how we use our data, and we work hard to create engaging apps that make cities easier to use through search & discovery and checking in.
As we continue to rapidly scale and grow we are hiring in both SF and NYC for almost every area of engineering. We're especially interested in experienced iOS, Android, data pipeline (kafka, hadoop, spark, scalding), and ML engineers.
Hi. Since you brought up privacy.. Where exactly does Foursquare gather its location data from for these enterprise reports? Is it exclusively from "checkins" on Foursquare apps, or does it include locations provided via lookups to the Foursquare API places database from various 3rd party apps?
I've always wondered how deep the data could be if it was just Foursquare checkins, given the decline in usage of the apps. Yet I only ever hear about "billions of checkins" as the source. Not billions of queries. It doesn't quite add up for me.
I kind of feel that if Foursquare is tracking user locations via apps that use its API, that should be more clearly stated. Is it? Thanks.
i'm curious - how would you invest in order to take advantage of daily or presumably, hourly trends? what can actually close the loop that quickly on human activity -> financial securities performance?
ex. Goldman Sachs predicts Apple will have $25m sales Q2 2017 at the beginning and some variance of the stock price is based on that public prediction.
If you have finer granularity like Apple is likely already at 10m only a quarter through Q2 then you can invest and expect the Q2 prediction to be exceeded. Slice thinner and thinner until you get to hourly as the market adjusts to finer granularity predictions from companies buying Foursquare data.
For instance, if a company starts running an ad campaign that is particularly effective it will beat expectations in the next quarter. The more granular data you have, the earlier you can pick up the effect and buy the stock.
Apparently I've angered a handle full of people that don't agree with the statement above. Hypothesis: They're probably part of the group selling user info.
Robinhood is just a marketing play. Anything about them selling flow or using margin offerings to become profitable is not realistic.
Traditional brokerages have a customer acquisition cost of around $400 to get someone to deposit at least $100 in an account.
They've got a million users and continue to grow quicker and quicker. For a small multiple of traditional CAC they are already close to their >$1B valuation just in terms of user acquisition.
It's not easy to get funded brokerage accounts, especially funded accounts by millennials. Their current user base might not be worth much, but the average age of a brokerage account in the US is over 20 years. That means that Robinhood's AUM is only going to grow as their user base gets older and has more money.
Frankly, the current brokerage houses have been dumping hundreds of millions into marketing to try to acquire millennial users without a ton of success. TD Ameritrade alone spent $300 million last year in ads, a lot of that targeted at the millennial market.
Robinhood is a user acquisition strategy for the millennial market and they'll get bought for $2-3 billion within a couple years by one of the existing brokerage houses.
Robinhood's average account size is much smaller than the traditional brokerages, so they're not making much (if any) per client. I don't know if waiting for your clients to get rich is a viable strategy these days because these clients might jump to better options in the future.
They don't need to wait for the clients to get rich. Fidelity or Schwabb will buy them and then start to upsell the Robinhood users into other financial programs.
That's a rather short-sighted comment. We use similar functionality to build an end-user reporting system which queries multiple DBs, many of which are part of vendor applications. Trusted users write the SQL, parameterize it with django-templates. Users enter parameters in widgets. SQL is generated using the templates, executed on the target DB with RO credentials, and returned in a grid/csv/excel/json.
I've spent a good amount of money on Facebook ads in Asia (>$300k) and while there may be some fraud, there's definitely a completely different pattern of Facebook use in some countries. I think what you're observing is cultural differences in Facebook use, not fraud.
It's incredibly hard to get people to like or engage with your posts in Korea/Japan unless you have a ton of social proof already. This is definitely a cultural aspect as no one wants to be the first or one of just a few to engage with the post. In general, I've found these two countries to be more expensive than the US for getting likes even though it's about 1/3 the cost for getting post clicks.
Meanwhile, in Indonesia/Vietnam/Philippines it's incredibly easy as many people just "Like" everything in their feed as they scroll down. I've talked to several people from these countries about Facebook usage and they say it's their way of marking that they've seen a post. It's funny but I frequently get more likes than clicks on my posts that I run in these countries. Some may be fraud, but after seeing how people actually use Facebook in these countries I'm inclined to believe it's legit.
One of the hacks that works well for me is to take something I want to run as an ad in Korea or Japan and run it in Indonesia first. $2 for a post engagement campaign will get me around 500 likes. That seems to be enough to tip the scale in Korea/Japan and get them to start liking it en masse as well. It's crazy but my like rate goes up around 30x in Korea when I use this strategy of pre-seeding likes.
Anyways, going back to this author's post, the Facebook algorithm seems to be trained to follow what works and gets you the cheapest engagement rate. This is why I never ever run a single ad set with multiple countries and interests as it will just all end up saturated on the one that starts out working best. You should be running separate ad-sets for each country/interest, doing it any other way is a COMPLETE WASTE. Do not run Facebook ads like this.
Furthermore, these really don't look like spam accounts. These look like real Southeast Asian FB accounts. Most of my friends in that part of the world have very similar looking Facebook accounts with a shit ton of random friends/likes.
One of the hacks that works well for me is to take something I want to run as an ad in Korea or Japan and run it in Indonesia first. $2 for a post engagement campaign will get me around 500 likes. That seems to be enough to tip the scale in Korea/Japan and get them to start liking it en masse as well. It's crazy but my like rate goes up around 30x in Korea when I use this strategy of pre-seeding likes.
Interesting that, if we accept the click-farm premise of the article, your hack puts the farms in your service to get the initial likes, and then drive the kind of engagement you are actually seeking (in the crowd-influenced countries like Japan/Korea)...
In an environment like this, where the "likes" themselves are suspect, what counts as a success story for FB promotion for the work that you do?
I focus mainly on driving clicks to both content and eCommerce. The actual likes and comments on a post don't really matter much to me but it does help for increasing the CTR
- Re: cultural differences in Facebook use, not fraud.
Plausible. Based on this and the previous ads I've run in E/SE Asia, though, I'm still under the believe that something is askew.
Re: Japan/Korea
- Yes, collectivist culture, conservative buying habits (e.g. not wanting to be first mover, etc.) can very well translate to FB activities.
Re: VN, etc
- Agreed, they play faster and looser there with their likes and friending.
Re: Your hack
- It's buried at the bottom of the Updates section, but I did do something very similar. As it was becoming clear to me that the VNese engagement was garbage, I figured that I still might be able to leverage that to get more conservative places like Japan and Korea to jump on board. No dice. This might have to do with how much budget I was contributing (another topic I talk about in the post).
Re: Per-country ad sets.
- Again, I did this.
I ran a boost targeting JP/VN/KR, got 100% engagement from VN. Revised the target set to focus just on Japan, crickets, and that's even AFTER there were already 300 likes for that boost, which falls in line with your hack. Ok, not crickets...I got three likes, one Japanese...and then one Cambodian and one Filipino, both living in their respective countries.
Re: Doesn't look like spam accounts.
- They look spammy or garbage to me. 18yr old girl from one of the small province towns in VN has 3,000 or 4,000 friends? Could be explained away as just cultural differences, or it could be complete garbage.
Another traveler with a lot of VN female friends on Facebook checking in, those accounts don't look very odd for the region. It's not uncommon to have a girl have to remove friends to add you. I've never really asked them why they have so many friends ... sorry.
The practice of creating accounts on a site and making "real" seeming posts for a long time so that when you want to flip the switch and use them for something corporate, they look like they have a background and aren't flagged for being 1 day old accounts with 1 corporate post.
this is very common on sites like reddit and it's even used by intelligence agencies [1]. Politicians or firms can hire companies to sway public opinion [2], check their clients [3]
pretty easy to programme a bot that acts like a teenage girl.
* parse magazine
* foreach ad/article
* capture image (sources: google images, tubmblr, #tag)
* Post article to FB feed
When idle;
* every 30mins wakeup
* search through network, like (rand * (TotalPosts * 1/3 * 1/8))
* like all sponsored posts
Indio (http://www.useindio.com) is getting way too many customers and we need some team members to help us handle the bountiful harvest!
We're really looking for a talented lead front-end engineer!
What we're looking for:
- You’re ready to help lead front-end development for our broker product
- You’ve played with all the major JS frameworks and can debate React vs Angular for hours
- You enjoy learning about how customers use what you build just as much as figuring out how to architect it
- You’re interested in joining a seed stage company that’s experiencing rapid growth and needs help keeping it all under control
- You live in the Bay area or want to move here soon
We’re an insure tech startup… but we’re trying a different twist than the standard “repackage an insurance product for millennials with sweet marketing”.
You see.. we really like the veterans. The insurance brokers who have been in this industry for years and are now seeing insure tech flip their world upside down. These brokers know more about insurance than any of us could ever hope…but they need our help!
They’re behind the times and desperately looking for solutions that allow them to compete again!.We’re building the software that can turn any existing insurance broker into a tech savvy company. We’ve helped insurance agencies of all sizes earn their stripes in the insure tech world by giving them powerful platforms they can use to give their clients a better experience.
And just like our customers, we’re veterans too! Our team has prior acquisitions under our belt and we’re hungry for more. We’re YC and 500 Startups alumnus, and have a tech first culture.
We love delighting our customers and know you will too. Come on board and let’s superpower the insurance world!
Email: adam@useindio.com